This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures, WADS'97, held in Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada, in August 1997.The 37 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 81 submissions. Also included are four abstracts and one full contribution corresponding to the invited talks. Among the topics covered are data structures and algorithmic aspects in a variety of areas like computational geometry, graph theory, networking, load balancing, optimization, approximation, sorting, pattern matching, etc.